Grit Lab Report

Hi Jules,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were achievement, benevolence, and self-direction.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were analytic, social, and kinesthetic.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to apply to grad school .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Get an A on my Finance exam .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Get a good GPA .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Procrastination .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I get home, I will put my phone away .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Academics .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Reflective when receiving critical feedback, and Reflective when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being work .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Something else .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel Good .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Interest and specialization can come late
Effort ^2 (more important than talent)
Learning rate is the same for everyone
You need to view obstacles to achieve your goal
Deliberate practice is needed to become and actual expert
Feedback = info on past performance
Failures and adversity is different
« Will power is not like a muscle »
Having friends is important
You need to have a purpose beyond yourself

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Ivy Deng
Jules! You are a funny guy. You are also incredibly intelligent and I really admire that. I appreciate having had the chance to become better friends this semester. Thank you for always being a great team leader. I am rooting for your discovery project! I know you will be able to achieve an incredible score because you are Jules. Your project reminded me of studying for the SATs. WOOP your way through it. :)
Farheen Shamdasani
Every time I step into Pret, I am tempted to order an iced skim milk latte. Jules, I am so glad I got to know you beyond the context of late nights & date nights this semester. Engaging in discussions with three girls is hard (I think), but you really completed Team 29. Thank you for always making us laugh and for keeping things so (so) real. I hope that we remain friends next semester, I would love to get to know you more! Tackling the GMAT is no easy feat, especially considering your goal of being in the 98th percentile. With that being said, I think the systematic way that you are approaching this goal will guide you towards success. The point that you made about building a support network of people with the same goals was so valuable—I will be sure to do the same while working towards my goals. I wish you the best of luck for your upcoming test!
Isobel Glass
Dear Jules, This letter may be the first good deed I have ever done in my life, so you are really special! I will begin by saying I feel very grateful to have been in Grit Lab with you. You have been an integral member of our infamous Grit Lab group and we would’ve been lost without our fearless leader. You are warm, approachable and occasionally quite funny! You have always been a key contributor to our entertaining and rich group discussions and go out of your way to always include everyone - it doesn’t go unnoticed. I have no doubt that you will do very well in your next journey and maybe even make some new friends along the way! In terms of your Discovery Project - in all honesty I did not know what the “GMAT” was before you began, so it was incredibly informative for me. I loved seeing the arc of your learning and how you applied various Grit Lab techniques to aid in your studying which ultimately concluded in such an impressive result on your practice test - congratulations are in order. I could sense how passionate you were about this undertaking and really appreciated the time you spent researching the historic scores and results over time. Great work!

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.